


Obsessions and Trust Issues

by orphan_account



Category: Stitchers (TV)
Genre: Cameron has no chill when it comes to helping Kirsten, Camus only briefly hinted at, F/M, Gen, Sickfic, Spoilers for Episode 6, The search for Stinger continues, no Nina bashing here, not many spoilers but enough to make things a little confusing if you haven't seen the ep yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-05 03:06:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6686674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kirsten was one step closer to finding her father. If she was obsessed with it before, the key she’s just found and the sudden realisation that somebody she didn’t know could get into her head kicked her into a whole new gear. Her friends, of course, all rallied to help her. She should have realised that Cameron would go beyond his means to stick by her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Obsessions and Trust Issues

**Author's Note:**

> Got the idea from stitchersfic.tumblr.com. Needed to write something after the last ep where it was firmly pounded into canon that Cameron is somebody Kirsten’s subconscious trusts. After all those times he’s asked her to, it’s been proven she does.  
> Feel free to continue this or alt POV this or change this up or even to write your own fill to the prompt. Fanfiction saves the world.

There was somebody hacking into her brain while she stitched. Even with her computer prowess and the nature of her job, Kirsten still found the notion very difficult to accept. It was even more difficult to get the notion out of her head – once the seed of doubt was planted, it grew into a vine with many branches, each of them ugly and choking and twisted. There was somebody she didn’t know hacking into her brain. Telling her the people she worked for – the people she _cared about_ – were not to be trusted.

She didn’t know what to believe any more, and her newfound emotions weren’t helping her remain level-headed. The only thing she knew for sure was that she _had_ to find her father. Stinger would have the answers that burned like acid in her mind and in her chest, and even if he didn’t have _all_ of them, _some_ were better than the _none_ she currently had. Elizabeth Brown’s mother hadn’t answered any of her calls after the first one, not even when she called from Camille or Cameron’s phones. But Kirsten had her phone number; one all-nighter of coding, a couple of felonies and some help from Camille and the lives of both Ms Browns suddenly became a lot less difficult to get into.

Honestly, she’d started out just looking for a way in to Elizabeth’s mother’s trust, or some kind of thing by Elizabeth _somewhere_ that would give her another clue about Stinger. Three more nearly-sleepless nights and a whole lot of nothing later, Kirsten found something entirely different. Elizabeth had published a thesis the year she’d married Stinger, and while Kirsten had no real interest in the noun class discrepancies of different languages, she glanced at the acknowledgements and a few of the pages just in case.

It was only because she was hoping against hope for some kind of hidden code that she found one. Or thought she did; some things in the thesis didn’t seem to sit _quite right,_ and a bit of Google searching just made her suspicions stronger. She had no idea what the code was – if there even was one – and what it would point to, but this was _her_ domain and it was a step closer to her father and she would pursue it with everything she had in her.

Keeping it from Camille was impossible, by this point. Her roommate had been slightly distracted and absent from the house, lately, but she was not _stupid_. And when Kirsten was _sure_ she cracked some of the code to say “Stinger”, Camille was around for the explosion. She told Kirsten she was crazy and seeing things because she _wanted_ to see them and she needed to _sleep_ and that obsessing was unhealthy about seven times. And then she rallied the troops to help.

Cameron and Linus showed up just as Camille had finished setting up the living room as a work station, and she exchanged the box of food in Cameron’s hand for the drive that had a copy of Elizabeth Brown’s thesis. The boys set up their laptops even as Kirsten argued that it was late on a Monday evening and they all had work in the morning and she was _fine_ and could do this by herself.

“I know you’re kinda new to this friends thing,” Camille interrupted her sixth attempt to get them all to leave, “but _this_ is happening, okay?”

For the first few hours, everybody ate and worked like a well-oiled machine. And then whatever awkward, icy _thing_ was between Camille and Linus reared its head, and Cameron and Kirsten were left trying to pretend they couldn’t hear every word being yelled from the kitchen. It was decided that Linus and Camille would basically do shifts, and Linus left with a curt goodnight. He was back the next evening, however, when Camille went to the gym, and only left when she was done showering and having dinner after she returned from her workout. Kirsten got used to the two of them orbiting their little setup, not startling any more when she came back to reality after getting lost in her own head to find one where the other had been the last time she’d looked. They helped as much as they could while dealing with life and school and parents and whatever hurt had happened between them, and she was too grateful they were there at all to mind in the slightest that it was not constant.

Cameron, on the other hand, was firmly in her line of sight almost every time she blinked up blearily from the computer screen or the scribbled notepad paper, or one of the fifty or so books that had made their home in her living room. Linus left to sleep and Camille went to bed and both of them ate and showered and had bits of their lives besides the job they wearily dragged themselves to every morning but he seemed like he’d permanently taken root on her sofa. Even when Maggie was yelling at all of them for being distracted and tired and not doing their jobs to top priority, there was something on his face that told her he was thinking of codes and not of biting, truthful words currently right in front of him. She should have learned, when the last time she told him she didn’t trust him he went and killed himself. But she hadn’t thought, and now he was pushing himself to the extremes to prove himself to her again – to _make_ her let him help her. And he still had time to stare at her worriedly every now and again, which was just _annoying_.

“Hey, loverboy. Won’t the missus be missing you?” Camille had asked that first Monday when the clock was ticking over to three am and Cameron hadn’t made any move to leave but had made a few pointed remarks about the level of obsessive behaviour in the room.  

“Family thing in San Diego for a week.”

“What, you’re not ready to meet the family?” But then Camille caught Linus’ eyes and her smirk fell away as sharply as a drop off a cliff and she walked out of the room without waiting for an answer, an excuse muttered into the silence as an afterthought.

Maggie’s words had no effect – they continued as they had been, but chugged more coffee and covered each other’s asses a bit better. Friday night saw Linus having to go spend time with his family, Camille at the gym again and Cameron coming around like clockwork to sit in the seat Camille had said would forever be moulded to the shape of his ass. Distracted, sleep-deprived, frustrated and a little wigged out by that afternoon’s stitch, Kirsten assumed it was because of all of the above and the absence of Nina for a week that made Cameron come in subdued and slightly stand-offish. She let him alone ( _some people_ knew when to let things go) and they both got to work in silence. Or as near to it as was possible on a Friday night – there were sounds of some distant party, cars stopping and starting all over, and the most annoying little repetitive noise Kirsten couldn’t place at all. At first, it was easy enough to just shut it out like she did the rest of the world. But eventually the persistence of it broke through even her haze of work, and she let herself look away so she could find the source of it and eradicate it. She hoped it wasn’t human-based, because she had only had eight hours of sleep in the past four days and her patience was worn completely thin.

It took her three irritated, intense glancing ups from her work for her to find the source of the noise, but once she did it seemed like somebody snuck up behind her and threw ice water all over her body. The sound that had been persistently hammering at her eardrums for hours on end was that of Cameron supressing coughs.

Even without temporal dysplasia it was easy for her to remember them stuck in the lab, infected with seemingly no cure. It was not something she wanted to remember, and the sudden clawing worry and unease made her sit forward and analyse every inch of him. Pale. Forehead shiny with the same sweat that stuck his hair down to him. Shivering or shaking or some equivalent. Squinting at his screen, despite it being more than close enough. Having to lock his lips every few seconds to supress a cough. Eyes dull and over-bright at the same time. Why hadn’t she noticed _any_ of this in the – she checked her clock – five hours since he’d been there?

She moved over to him –  taking her time as she very cautiously stepped over very careful stacks of papers and books and maps and phone directories and laptop chords – and he started when she took a seat. As before, he jerked out of the way of her approaching hand with a noise of protest. As before, she was relentless. He was very obviously warm and very clammy beneath her hand.

“Cameron.”

“It’s just a cold.” His voice sounded sandpaper rough and he was _definitely_ congested. She spotted the used tissues hidden sneakily in the sneakers that had been taken off and placed beside him. “It’s fine. I can do this.” She hesitated, watching a bead of sweat run from his forehead down his face, and he sighed. “I’m not about to… keel over, Stretch. It’s just a cold. I’m _fine_.”

She returned to her computer, but her single-minded focus was broken. For the first time that week, she couldn’t simply shut out everything else and focus only on the work; thoughts of Cameron flavoured by different emotions kept popping up and hindering her slide into oblivion.

“Don’t do that,” she told him, a few minutes later. “Just… cough. Properly.”

Except then the sound of him coughing, even into the crook of his arm, made sparks of worry ignite in her every time it happened. Which was far too often and far too long-lasting for her liking. He shuffled, slow and strange and hunched, when he went to the kitchen, and it was a sight that made her have to re-read the same paragraph of the thesis four times over, the words washing over her without sinking in. He returned with tea for both of them – mostly for him, she was sure – and when his hands trembled when he gave her her cup she found every thought derailed to the point of not even pretending she could focus right then. She watched him sink back down onto the sofa, cradling the cup of tea close to his chest, and when all he did was try to inhale the steam through his nose and get the cup as close to his chest as possible, she abandoned her post and carefully, slowly extracted herself from her nest so she could go to her bedroom. She had no idea where the blankets were – even her duvet was missing – and after two frustrating minutes she simply reached into her closet and pulled out her biggest sweater. He looked doubtful when she tried to hand it to him, but she insisted and he obeyed and he looked entirely too grateful for the ridiculous-on-him-looking knitwear.

That revelation on top of everything else made it even more difficult to get back to work, but eventually she moved on to new paragraphs and started getting back into the groove, even with Cameron’s coughing as a soundtrack. Camille came home, smelling of gym, took one look at Cameron and began an exchange that brought Kirsten back the little distance she’d zoned out to. He looked _worse_ , but quipped back at Camille, and she finally left to shower before returning to help them in their quest. She met Kirsten’s gaze and winced a little before inclining her head in a _I’m trusting that he’s not lying and is actually fine_ way. Kirsten, only a little mollified, went back to work.

More hours, more coughing, more tea later and Cameron suddenly got to his feet and went to the door, opening it and staring out into the night.

“What are you doing?” Camille asked, jerking upright from where she’d been slowly falling asleep in her chair.

“There was somebody knocking. You guys weren’t answering. So I thought…” Cameron shook his head, closed the door, returned to his seat. Kirsten and Camille stared at him in exhausted stupidity. Then suddenly looked at the door again. “This one is on you guys.”

Camille and Kirsten shared a glance, confirming their suspicions. “Cameron… There’s no knocking,” Kirsten said, surprised at how gentle her voice came out.

Cameron gave them a half confused, half irritated look. “Guys. There’s somebody knocking on the door.” They both glanced at each other again and Camille slowly got up and went to the door. There was nobody there, even when she went all the way outside to look around. “No,” Cameron said when she came back, shut the door and looked at him oddly, and there was disbelief in every too-pale line of him. “There’s knocking. Is it Linus? It’s Linus, isn’t it. This is such a lame – ”

He tried to get up and swayed so badly he nearly fell. Kirsten leapt to her feet, careful stacks of papers and laptop forgotten, but Camille got there first.

“Woah, tiger. Down. Just sit down.” She shoved Cameron back to the sofa, where he crumpled like a puppet with cut strings. “And stay there.”

Cameron’s attempt to answer her turned into a coughing fit that lasted until she returned, thermometer in hand. Kirsten, who had come to sit beside him, could only pat his back helplessly as he tried to breathe, and grab his hand so he would stop trying to bat the thermometer away.

“Okay, yeah,” Camille said, looking at the thermometer once it beeped. Cameron had stopped coughing, but his breathing sounded _terrible_. “That knocking is what we call a _hallucination_. Given the fact your fever is currently starting to fry your brain a little.”

“My fever isn’t that high,” Cameron rasped.

“Uh, my thermometer telling me you’re 103.7 says differently.”

Cameron snatched the thermometer and stared at it wavering in his shaking hands for a long moment. Finally, he turned to Kirsten, who still had her hand on his back. “There’s no knocking?” he asked in a small voice. She felt horrible as she shook her head and he sagged against the back of the sofa.

Camille – her streaks of sass and kickass second only to her streak of pure mothering instinct – leaned into his field of vision with one hand on his shoulder. “Cameron? Hey. I need to know if you’re allergic to any meds. Or if any of them will… you know… interfere with any of the ones you’re already taking for…” She gestured at his chest.  

Cameron shook his head, a cough stealing the air he would have used to reply, and Camille stroked his hair gently before she got up. “I’m going on a drug store run. You’re in charge of getting his fever down a little,” she instructed Kirsten, who nodded.

“Here,” Cameron managed, reaching clumsily into his pocket to extract his wallet. Camille made a rude noise at his offered cash, and Cameron sighed. “I’m the one with the rich parents,” he reminded her.

“And I’m the one with no shits to give,” Camille responded smartly, reaching for her jacket and her keys.

“It’s some medicine, not a diamond ring, Girlfriend,” Kirsten chimed in, patting him on the arm. “Just let us handle this, okay?”

He didn’t put up another fight when Kirsten put his money back in his wallet or when she handed him a couple of bags of frozen vegetables to put on himself to try and get him cooler. But he refused point blank to remove her sweater, or to lie down. She argued with him for a little bit, exhaustion making her logic slippery like a fresh fish, but the sight of him trying to not let her notice him glancing at the door again in wary confusion made sympathy and worry so strong crash against her she just let it go. Fetching her laptop, she sat beside him on the sofa as close as possible, her gut churning in worry as she realised she was most of the reason he was still able to sit upright.

Stubbornly, Cameron pulled his own laptop onto his lap and stared resolutely at the screen, twitching every so often in a way that told her he was trying not to turn to look at the front door _again_. Up close, it was impossible to miss how utterly _miserable_ he was – he was rasping breaths through his mouth, listing into her, eyes drooping, hands shaking almost violently. Not three minutes later he was once again trying to swallow his own coughs in an effort to seem better than he was. Or to try and not get her sick, she supposed. Both actions were stupid and futile – she would already be infected by that point, and Kirsten was pretty sure even one of their corpses could tell Cameron was sick as a dog. His body beat her to telling him off; one moment he was swallowing coughs and the next he was actually doubled over with the force of them, near-gasping for breath as his body shook. Some impulse she couldn’t name had Kirsten grabbing him and pulling him toward her. Cameron’s head landed heavily on her shoulder and stayed there as her hand rubbed against his chest soothingly, trying to help him though the fit. When he was finally done, the arm he’d been holding to his mouth sort of collapsed into his lap, and he turned his head so his face was buried into her neck.

“Kirsten,” he said, weakly, and didn’t say anything else. She found her hand was still on his chest, fingers splayed on either side of his scar.

Some kind of impulse from some memory of Ed deep inside her made her start to read the words in front of her out loud as Cameron’s uneven breaths trickled hot down her neck. She read quietly with no great leaps of inflection and although she didn’t take a single word in kept powering through paragraph after paragraph. Cameron’s breathing changed and she reached over to rescue the laptop from his slack hands, adjusted the small bag of peas on his forehead and let him sleep against her.  

Camille stopped a little to look at the scene they made, but didn’t say anything. Instead, she went into the kitchen silently, rummaged around, and returned with a glass of water, a packet of pills, and a carton of leftover Chinese from the fridge. Both girls woke Cameron up, using gentle voices and light touches to pull him back to the world of the woken. Camille insisted he eat before he took any medication, and the fact that Cameron actually obeyed her, shovelling food into his mouth like a mechanical man. She’d think it funny, later, that this was the point where the reality _really_ hit home: on any other given day there would be no way in hell Cameron would eat fridge-cold five-day-old Chinese takeaway straight from the carton. She was the one who forced him to drink all the water, and the one who tried the “take a nap for fifteen minutes while the meds kick in” approach. Camille took on the role of bad cop and together they managed to get him lying down on the sofa with his half-thawed bags of vegetables. Camille produced a pillow and Kirsten’s duvet from some magical place, and Cameron’s last half-mumbled protests were tucked away under the blanket.  

“Shit,” Camille muttered when his breathing had already evened out. “We should have made him take off his contacts. Isn’t sleeping with them on, like, pretty bad?”

Because of course Cameron never did things half measures. They deliberated for another moment, almost hovering in their anxiety, but ultimately decided against waking him. Kirsten returned to her nest with her laptop and Camille brought out hers, but it was obvious to both women that neither would be very productive for the rest of the evening. And, strangely enough, Kirsten was okay with that knowledge in a way she hadn’t been since she’d started on the quest to find Stinger. Suddenly, the intensity of the need to find him seemed a little diluted.

They took it in turns getting up to check Cameron’s temperature or replace the cool cloth on his forehead or shush him if he started muttering distressed-sounding things in his sleep. When Camille finally tapped out, it was with an invitation to share a bed again so Cameron could take Kirsten’s. The explanation – which Kirsten insisted came out less clear than she intended because she was just so very tired – that she probably wouldn’t sleep and if she did she would sleep in the same bed as Cameron, was met with a very typical raised eyebrow and _look_. Even when she irritably explained that somebody would probably need to watch him in the evening and he was _out cold_ and only slightly coherent, for flip’s sake, not to mention _seeing somebody_ didn’t make the look go away. But Camille didn’t say or do anything else, and it was because of that that Kirsten swore to herself she wouldn’t use the fact that Camille actually kissed Cameron on the forehead before heading to bed against her roommate.

Without the presence of another awake soul in the house and with the acceptance that she was no longer being burned alive with the obsessive desire to find her father five minutes ago, Kirsten found her tired, worried, drained mind wandering onto other thought patterns. Like the other anomalies and mysteries in her life, and how they could possibly be connected.

 _Because everyone you think you can trust is lying to you._   Her natural inclination was to believe the voice on the phone – to trust nobody but herself until she got to the bottom of everything. But Cameron… All he ever tried to do was make her trust him. She’d meant it, wholeheartedly, when she’d said he was her _best_ friend. And yet telling him that they were _using him_ to somehow get into her head as she stitched…

Kirsten watched him toss and turn a little in his sleep, eyes scrunched as though bothered by the brightness, and flicked off the main lights so her laptop and the fairy lights in the window were the only thing staving off the darkness. She didn’t want him worrying about her. This wasn’t his fight; this was _hers_. He was already far too involved. And the thought of him getting hurt again…

Cameron coughed heavily, and guilt welled up painfully inside her. He’d already gotten hurt again. Because of her. She really had to get him to stop pushing himself to _stupid_ limits for her. She’d prefer a Cautious Cameron who would be around for years and years to come, sprouting movie lines and knowing her almost better than she knew herself any day.

Somehow the musing on how to keep him safe – musing that started out logical and became more and more absurd – turned to dreams and she found herself suddenly startling, neck aching from falling asleep in the chair. There was something over her and she fingered it, confused for long moments before the sound and the light had her attention snapping to the sofa. Cameron was awake; mostly upright and staring at his laptop screen in deep concentration. He was still wearing her sweater, but the duvet was now tucked around Kirsten instead.

“Cameron?” He started and blinked into the darkness, trying to see her. “What are you _doing_?”

“I can figure this out,” he insisted, his voice still scratchy and sounding some level beyond dead tired. “I’ve gotten a lot further down this thesis and I think I found some more code words. One looks like a location – it could be where your father flew to. I can’t quite find where _exactly_ it’s supposed to be but…”

He fell silent as Kirsten came to sit beside him, her eyes roving over the scribbled notes that had obviously been done in the dark so he didn’t wake her. His browser had over twenty tabs open, and he couldn’t seem to decide which one to let her see properly; he kept flipping through them all anxiously. The clock on the machine said it was twelve minutes past three in the morning. Kirsten put a hand to his forehead and grimaced when she found him still far too warm.

“Come on. Bed.” He started to protest at once. “ _Cameron_. No. Both of us need sleep.” And when he looked at her warily, hopefully, she affirmed, “I’ll go sleep if you do.”

He thought about this for another beat and then nodded, rubbing at his face before snapping the laptop shut. He was going to be so peeved he didn’t shut it down properly when he wasn’t exhausted and probably aching and weak and still miserable. She stood first and let him follow, holding out her hands to steady him when he swayed rather dangerously. Standing that close to him she could tell his knees were threatening to buckle, even though it was almost pitch-black.

“Can you do this?” she asked him seriously.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m…” His head sank down so his burning, clammy forehead rested on hers. “I’m just…”

She put her arm around his waist to hold him steady, and for the first time ever she thought of him as _breakable_. So easily breakable. Cameron lifted his head slowly and she took it as a queue that he was a little bit more all right. Slinking his arm over her shoulder, they started taking baby steps toward the bathroom, Cameron stumbling like he was drunk.

Kirsten knew the lay of the house by memory and feel alone, and she got them to the bathroom without incident, even though her gut churned in worry at how every step seemed to actually hurt him. She made Cameron sit on the toilet seat and remove his contacts – in one of her non-concentrating stages after they’d put him to sleep on the sofa she’d Googled what happened if one slept in them and concluded she was not going to let him do _that_ ever again – and left him poking around in his eye lethargically to go and get him a huge glass of water, some more pills and her duvet.

He chugged the whole glass like a man just emerging from the desert, even though she had to keep one hand on the glass to steady it because she was afraid he wasn’t strong enough to hold it up for that long. She levered him upright but without his contacts or his glasses the hand he reached toward the sink for support missed by a good few inches and the lack of something solid holding his weight made his legs fold beneath him. She only just managed to stop him cracking his head on the tiles or the side of the toilet.

“Talk to me,” she said, feeling panicky and not knowing what to do.

“’s fine. Sorry.” He turned his head to cough again, eyes still screwed shut. “Everything’s… it’s weird. Floaty. I’m all wobbly.”

“I’ve got you. Take it _slow_.”

He nearly collapsed a second time, but this time she was ready for it and shoved herself under his arm like a human crutch to deter his descent. The walk to her bedroom, her trailing her duvet, like a mournful train, was the longest one she’d ever taken in that stretch of hallway. He didn’t get into bed so much as simply fall into it, and Kirsten took her time tucking him in and arranging another damp cloth across his face. When she crawled under the covers beside him and there was no joke about it or request to remain above the covers or even any response at all, she reached again to feel his temperature, heart hammering painfully.

 “Go to sleep, Cupcake,” he muttered at her.

Obediently, she curled up into him, and felt him wrap himself around her. The beat of his heart, muted but still very distinguishable, made some mixture of relief and affection and peace wash through her. The sleepless nights had definitely caught up with her; she was fading within a few seconds, snug against the temporary furnace that was Cameron’s body.

“Cameron?” She could just make out the part of the wall she’d turned into the board to find her father.

“Mmm?”

“I’m going to tell you once you’re not sick any more. What’s going on. What I saw.” He started to say something else, but she shook her head, her cheek swishing across her sweater he was still wearing. “Later. Not now. Okay?” There was a beat of silence. Kirsten let her eyes close and, around a yawn, she said, “Besides. We only use a fraction of our brain's true potential when we're awake. When we're asleep, we can do almost anything.”

“ _Very_ nice,” he said, and she could _hear_ the smile in his voice.

It made her smile in return, and her lips remained quirked upwards until she fell asleep.

 __  
  


 

 


End file.
